Prior to the availability of presentation applications, such as POWERPOINT from MICROSOFT CORPORATION and KEYNOTE from APPLE INC., users often relied on printed materials or manual writing surfaces to supplement an oral lecture. Examples of printed materials include handouts, pamphlets, overhead transparencies, posters, charts, photographic slides, and the like. Examples of manual writing surfaces include chalkboards, whiteboards, and the like.
These early presentation mediums had a number of drawbacks. For example, an audience may have difficulty focusing on a speaker while reading the handouts. Further, generating pamphlets, posters, charts, and photographic slides may be cost prohibitive, especially when the presentation is given in a limited number. With manual writing surfaces, the audience may be focused on taking notes, instead of listening to the speaker. Also, the effectiveness of manual writing surfaces depends heavily on the handwriting skills of the speaker.
The advent of presentation applications has provided users with the ability to generate and display rich presentations embedded with text, graphics, and other multimedia content. A conventional presentation application provides an editor interface for generating a presentation and a slideshow interface for displaying the presentation. A conventional editor interface provides a blank template containing multiple slides. The user can insert text, graphics, sound, and other multimedia into the slides via the editor interface. The slides can then be displayed via the slideshow interface in a linear presentation flow. For example, common operations for traversing slides in the presentation include “next slide” for viewing the next slide in a predefined sequence and “previous slide” for viewing the previous slide in the predefined sequence.
In conventional presentation applications, the content inserted into the slides is generally limited to the size of the slide, which is usually a finite space. In order to insert large content (e.g., large text, detailed charts, process maps) greater than the size of the slide, the large content is usually resized or manually divided into smaller portions. Each smaller portion can then be inserted into a separate slide. Downsizing the large content may decrease the quality (e.g., the resolution) of the content. Dividing the content into smaller portions may be time-consuming and require the use of separate editing software. Also, some file types, such as detailed charts and spreadsheets, may not be amenable to a division without entirely recreating the file.
Further, conventional presentation applications are generally not capable of handling interactive content, such as websites and demonstrations, without launching an external program. Launching an external program may cause a new window to open and disrupt the linear presentation flow of the slideshow.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.